Epigraph

content/read/039.md

@@ -1,156 +1,114 @@
-# Ioan Bălan --- 2305
+# Dr. Carter Ramirez --- 2112
+
+Carter could not explain why she had created the throw-away account to talk with Sasha. Nor could she fully explain that panic that had washed over her, strong enough for her to flee, to log out and wipe both account and sim.
+
+All she could explain was that Sasha's simple questioning had thrown her estimate of what might be going on both within the dynamic of the team as well as within the 'net as a whole into utter turmoil. The woman...skunk...skunk-woman had been correct: while there were occasional reports on their findings published to a scant few reviewers and advisors within the UCL itself, there had been none since RJ had gotten lost. No papers published in any journal, public or private. The phenomenon of the lost was new, and so was the study of them.
+
+So how was it that the grantors were throwing their weight around in terms of the directions her team was taking? How would they know to do so? An informant? A mole?
+
+After logging off, she picked up a sandwich at a nearby M&S, but could not bring herself to eat more than a few bites of it. When she lay down, sleep would not come easily, and when it did, all it brooked her was the same stress-dream of shadows.
+
+How does one encompass all of this in one mind? How does one take in the knowledge of being spied upon, of having decisions made --- made by the unseen and unknowable --- that impact one's life on such a base level and some how make that work? Make it fit? How does one do these things, and still go back to a workaday life?
+
+Work felt impossible. Everyone around her was a suspect. Everyone around her was suspicious in their own way. Everyone around her was someone who was in secret communication with others, and, without any knowledge of those communications, what guarantee did she have that she was safe?
+
+And was she not communicating with others? She was the one who had contacted Sasha. She was the one who had contacted Johansson. Was she not worthy of suspicion?
+
+The worst was the lack of answers. She could ask all the questions she wanted, and there were no answers to be had.
+
+Finding it impossible to get down to the business of actually working, she paced between rig and coffee station. If, perhaps, there was some way that she could think harder, think better, then perhaps she might be able to fit all of this within her newly updated worldview.
+
+All the coffee did was up her heart rate. It did not wake her any, did not make her more efficient. It simply kicked her anxiety up another level.
+
+All her rig had to offer was the work at hand.
+
+She delved in all the same. If nothing else, she could use the dark. She could use the cool *Eigengrau* of her workspace, the order of information neatly delineated by thin cotton twine. Perhaps numbers would sooth her anxious mind.
+
+A soft ping. A notification. A small bell still loud enough to jolt her out of her reverie, or non-reverie, or whatever this caffeine-tinted haze was. *Avery would like a meeting.*
+
+Carter found it hard to sit still in the small room. It was all she could do to keep from pacing agitatedly, and she focused instead on keeping her steps more within the realm of slow and contemplative. *Is this out of the ordinary? Is me walking back and forth out of the norm enough to report to some higher authority?*
+*Is Avery on my side?*
+
+"Dr Ramirez, sorry for bothering you."
+
+"No problem, Avery. What's up?"
+
+They shrugged. "That's just the thing, I'm not really sure. I started digging into what we were talking about, about how e8 was looking into DDR records before eir disappearance, and on a hunch, I decided to look at all of our other candidate cases. Turns out most of them, even the ones who weren't heavy politics junkies, had a massive uptick in the amount of engagement they showed prior to getting lost."
+
+Carter frowned. "Wait, so not just e8? All of them?"
+
+"Well, sort of. Of those who are just the junkies, it's hard to pull apart just how much of their interactions were actually off baseline for them, you know? A set that large, a slight increase might not be that out of the norm. Still, it is there."
+
+"Do you have a starting point for these increases?"
+
+"Nothing in particular. In absolute terms, no." Avery's smile was wry. "Perhaps obviously. After the initial rush of cases, everyone got lost at different times. Relatively, though, maybe. It looks like everyone who had this uptick had it within seventy-two hours of getting lost."
+
+"How confident are you in that?"
+
+"Are you asking how strong the correlation is?"
+
+"Sure." She hesitated. "Though I'm also curious about your confidence in this line of reasoning."
+
+They looked up to the ceiling. "Well, in terms of the line of reasoning, I'd say that it's strong enough that it's got me actually interested in looking deeper into it. Not that I wasn't interested in these cases before, but this is really intriguing. I like the sort of...well, mystery aspect of it."
+
+"Yeah, it does have that going for it, doesn't it?"
+
+"And it always did before, too." Avery dropped their gaze once more and shrugged."Just that now, I feel like I was handed a big bone in terms of what could actually be going on. It's not an answer, but of all the correlations we've been looking until now, this is one of the bigger ones."
+
+"That strong of a correlation, then?"
+
+"Well, look." They summoned a snatch of workspace, pulled a vcard from one of their decks, and tugged on the corners to expand it to presentation size. A table filled the page, but after a few commands from Avery, it shrunk, slid up to the corner, and in its place, a graph appeared, showing a series of correlation points and a trend line. "It's fairly strong if we leave everyone in, but if we filter...out...there. If we filter out the junkies, you can see how high it spikes."
+
+Leaning in closer to the page, Carter scowled at the graph, then up at the minimized table, and back to the graph. "That's higher than anything else we've gotten, right?"
+
+Avery nodded, tapped in a few more commands on a keyboard Carter could not see. They frowned at some mistakes they made along the way, but then the graph was overlaid against other correlations they had been investigating previously. "Just over one standard deviation, yes, though...wait."
+
+Carter had started to nod along with Avery, then frowned at her subordinate's growing confusion. "What?"
+
+"Do you see that?"
+
+She looked back to the graph. "See wh--wait, what?!"
+
+"Do you *see* that?" Avery said, louder. It was as though they themselves needed the convincing, that they needed to have this witnessed right along with them.
+
+And it *was* worth witnessing. As both of them watched, wide-eyed, the graph shifted. The strength of the correlation started to dip. Not smoothly, but in fits and starts. Avery's hand darted up and, with a fingertip, they dragged the table out to fill more of the card's surface. There, along with the graph, the numbers of the correlation were beginning to change. Row by row, the 'interactions DDR by hour 72 lim' values were dropping. They were still high, yes, but perhaps more reasonable. The correlation was still there, but weaker.
+
+"What--"
+
+"Do you have this data backed up anywhere?" Carter was shouting. Didn't know how to keep from shouting.
+
+"I-- maybe. Sec." A few hasty commands, and the data was dumped to another card, the column name changed to a keysmash. The numbers stopped dropping on that card, even as they continued on the first. They handed the card to Carter. "But what--"
+
+"Pull me back and hit my panic button. Quick!"
+
+Avery stared, open-mouthed.
+
+"*Go!*"
+
+There was the pleasant animation of a user logging out and Avery disappeared.
+
+Carter braced herself, but even so, the jolt of pain running in a sparkling thread down along her spine was stronger than she remembered, and she came up gasping, hands shaking from where Avery held them just above her contacts. With their knee, they hit the panic button on the rig, and the flip-up screen began ticking off cores dumped and suggesting that an official report be filed.
+
+Still shaking, she looked around the office. Everyone was delved in except her, Avery, and Prakash, standing startled by the mini-fridge.
+
+"Everything alright?" he asked, brow furrowed.
+
+Carter waved her hand dismissively, trying to look calm. She doubted that she did. "Was in a meeting. Crashed or something."
+
+Perhaps picking up on the anxiety of the last minute, perhaps experiencing their own terror, Avery nodded. "We were in a meeting, uh...trying something. She started..." they trailed off and shrugged.
+
+Prakash nodded. "Need to file a report? Anything like that?"
+
+Carter stood, wobbled, and regained her balance. "I will after some water. Getting yanked hurts worse than I remember."
+
+"I haven't done it since training."
+
+Avery shrugged. "I don't think many have. It's not all that common."
+
+Rinsing her mug free of coffee residue --- additional caffeine at the moment being contraindicated --- Carter attempted a laugh. "Right, yeah. I've had sims crash before, but not myself."
+
+The laugh didn't seem to soothe either of her coworkers.
+
+"Well, either way, I'm kinda shaken up. I think...uh," she trailed off, looking at her phone. "Maybe a walk. Yeah, I think maybe a walk."
 
-Interview with: Dear, Also, The Tree That Was Felled  
-On the formation of the Clade  
-Ioan Bălan  
-Systime 181+338 1644
 
-> **Dear, Also, The Tree That Was Felled**: What, specifically, do you want to know about the clade?
-> 
-> **Ioan Bălan**:  Other than "start at the beginning, and when you get to the end, stop?"
-> 
-> **Dear**: [laughter] Yes. I could do that, I suppose, but it wouldn't make for a very good story.
-> 
-> **Ioan**: Right. I suppose start at the beginning, specifically with your decision to upload.
-> 
-> **Dear**: You understand that there will be portions of that story that I cannot tell you, yes?
-> 
-> **Ioan**: Of course.
-> 
-> **Dear**: [thoughtful silence] Okay. Did you ever come across...well, no. When did you upload?
-> 
-> **Ioan**: 2238. June or something.
-> 
-> **Dear**: [sighs] No. Okay, well, in your research, did you ever come across mentions of "the lost"?
-> 
-> **Ioan**: Yes. Lots of turmoil around then. Early 2100s, right?
-> 
-> **Dear**: [nods] Yes. Though it's strange, now that I think about it. The turmoil at the time felt very small and personal. While there was all this grand-scale stuff going on around us, we were dealing with friends and acquaintances disappearing. There were so few cases at first that it was just this thing the news would publish as a sort of curiosity. "Look! Isn't this strange? The scientists are working so hard!" [laughter] It wasn't until after that the turmoil you're talking about began.
-> 
-> **Ioan**: Okay. Did you upload during?
-> 
-> **Dear**: Oh goodness, no. Uploading had been something scientists and such had been poking at, but that no one had yet to accomplish. Or, well, perhaps someone had accomplished. Some had claimed to, at least. The consensus at the time is that, while it was likely possible, there would be little chance of having systems large enough to house more than two or three individuals. It was not a...ah, not a linear increase in complexity, I think. Add another mind, and the complexity more than doubles. [pause] It was the lost who started it, in a way. The things we learned from them when they came back--
-> 
-> **Ioan**: How many-- sorry for the interruption. How many came back? Of those you knew?
-> 
-> **Dear**: Oh, all of them came back! Just that some of them didn't last long, after.
-> 
-> **Ioan**: Including the...uh, the owner of the Name?
-> 
-> **Dear**: [pause, tense] Yes. In a way.
-> 
-> **Ioan**: Okay. Back to the uploading side, then. The lost taught you...
-> 
-> **Dear**: [visibly relaxing] Right, yes. When they came back, many of them --- many of us, for I was briefly among their number --- talked about what we had learned while...uh, in there. The things that we talked about and described are what sent the wonks down new avenues of research, and that eventually led to the first uploading tech. From there, there was the usual "too expensive" hand-wringing, but it all marches on, you know? [laughs] It got cheaper, the tech got better, the L5 station and Ansible were set up. Population was getting out of hand again, and some wag decided to pitch uploading as a solution.
-> 
-> **Ioan**: I remember that, yeah. The posters were all over the place.
-> 
-> **Dear**: Yes. Notably, as the cost came down, it was pitched as something for the poorer classes to take advantage of.
-> 
-> **Ioan**: And were you...I mean--
-> 
-> **Dear**: [laughs] Poor? Not particularly, actually. It appealed to me for...different reasons. I'd prefer not to get into those at the moment.
-> 
-> **Ioan**: Alright.
-> 
-> **Dear**: Yes. Well. [pause] Okay, right, I uploaded in the 2130s, shortly after the L5 station was set up. It had become sufficiently cheap that It was something I could afford--
-> 
-> **Ioan**: Cheap? How much?
-> 
-> **Dear**: It was...well, still a considerable portion of my savings.
-> 
-> **Ioan**: I see.
-> 
-> **Dear**: Why do you ask?
-> 
-> **Ioan**: We were --- our families were, I mean --- paid for us to upload.
-> 
-> **Dear**: Oh? Fancy that! [laughter] Anyway. It had become something that I could afford, and I leapt on the chance. It had been around long enough that it still felt relatively established, but was still a far cry from what it was now. This was probably early systime 10+, I mean. Folks knew what they were doing, but much of the society --- what we think of society --- here had not gelled into what it is today.
-> 
-> **Ioan**: You mention that it cost to fork, yes.
-> 
-> **Dear**: Yes. The reputation markets were already set up by then, but since this was before the system's proper expansion and some tech that came later --- I couldn't begin to understand it --- it was gently discouraged by the market.
-> 
-> **Ioan**: It hadn't reached this...post-scarcity, you mean?
-> 
-> **Dear**: Right. There was still a scarcity of resources and we were still sufficiently...ah, still sufficiently human, perhaps, socially human, that this was used as a lever, a measure of one's class.
-> 
-> **Ioan**: We still have the markets, though.
-> 
-> **Dear**: [laughter] Not like we did then.
-> 
-> **Ioan**: Alright. Don't suppose you would be able to do what you do today back then.
-> 
-> **Dear**: Not at all, no. It does still cost some minuscule portion of credit for one to fork now, but I digress. We began as Michelle and did the things that Michelle did, forking infrequently. This was still a few years before the distinctions between strategies started up. Most everyone was a tasker back then by virtue of the markets.
-> 
-> **Ioan**: It's hard to picture you as a tasker.
-> 
-> **Dear**: [laughter] Right, yes. As everything started to get cheaper, though, those distinctions began to emerge. By then, Michelle had a few long-lived instances, tagged as you are, Mx #c1494bf.
-> 
-> **Ioan**: [laughter] Thank you. This was before the Ode?
-> 
-> **Dear**: The Ode itself existed. That came before we uploaded.
-> 
-> **Ioan**: Before the Ode clade, though?
-> 
-> **Dear**: Right, yes. Michelle and her forks existed, but the very idea of clades was new at the time. At one point, though, she and a few other founders began to describe their trees as such. The larger trees grew --- for those who maintained long-running forks, that is --- the more unwieldy tags became, and folks decided on names. Some folks settled on simple standards. Another of the founders, the Jonas clade, for instance, uses syllabic prefixes. Ar Jonas, Ko Jonas, and so on. Leading vowels the first forks, then leading consonants, then the vowels following the consonants, *et cetera ad infinitum*.
-> 
-> **Ioan**: And you chose the Ode.
-> 
-> **Dear**: Michelle did, yes. She had picked up a contrarian streak during the whole lost saga.
-> 
-> **Ioan**: Did she play a large role in that?
-> 
-> **Dear**: [taken aback] Did her name not come up in your research?
-> 
-> **Ioan**: Not on the lost, no. Just on the founders.
-> 
-> **Dear**: [frowning] Well, alright. Yes, she played a role, but time softens rough edges, I suppose. Either way, the things she did gave her enough reputation to fork, and she chose the Ode to name her instances while remaining Michelle, herself. She started with the first lines of each stanza, then let them create and name their own forks from there.
-> 
-> **Ioan**: Thus the limited dispersionista style.
-> 
-> **Dear**: [nodding] Right. Each stanza became a small family of taskers, in a way. We, the Odists, create our own forks as needed, but don't let them live long. Or aren't supposed to, at least.
-> 
-> **Ioan**: "Aren't supposed to"?
-> 
-> **Dear**: Oh, I'm sure a few of us have created long-running forks while everyone else has turned their head.
-> 
-> **Ioan**: Have you?
-> 
-> **Dear**: [smiling, shrugging, mu-gesture] By virtue of our set-up, though, such forks are not members of the clade. Those forks are not named as such, and likely not in communication with any other cocladists aside from their immediate down-tree instance.
-> 
-> **Ioan**: Is the Ode available somewhere for me to read?
-> 
-> **Dear**: Of course. I'll give you a copy. That's hardly secret.
-> 
-> **Ioan**: And the clade, how long has it been since you have all been together.
-> 
-> **Dear**: This will be the first time there have been more than half of us together in one spot.
-> 
-> **Ioan**: Ever?
-> 
-> **Dear**: [nodding] Ever. Some dispersionistas are families. I mentioned the Jonas clade before; Jonas Prime has set up regular intraclade communication. Some are just clades, defined by ancestry with no further connections.
-> 
-> **Ioan**: Are you in touch with any of your cocladists?
-> 
-> **Dear**: I'm assuming you mean "in normal times"? Right. One or two. Serene and I get along quite well, and I talk with Praiseworthy --- Those That Lived Are Forever Praiseworthy, the first line of my stanza --- with some frequency. Michelle and I have talked a few times. She comes to my exhibitions.
-> 
-> **Ioan**: Ever talked to, um...
-> 
-> **Dear**: Qoheleth?
-> 
-> **Ioan**: Yes. I was going to say "Life Breeds Life" but forgot the line.
-> 
-> **Dear**: Names are important, Ioan. If he has decided on Qoheleth, then Qoheleth it is. 
-> 
-> **Ioan**: Right, sorry. I was in the mindset of the lines. Have you talked with him?
-> 
-> **Dear**: Before this? No. Not knowingly.
-> 
-> **Ioan**: And how do you feel about seeing the whole clade together?
-> 
-> **Dear**: I would be surprised if we manage to net all of them. [laughter] But I suppose I feel excited. Not necessarily because I have never met many of them so much as because it feels like we as a clade have a goal in front of us. Seeing them is secondary to them --- to us --- actually doing something. Accomplishing something.
-> 
-> **Ioan**: And what do you hope to get out of it? This gathering?
-> 
-> **Dear**: [smiling] A story. Others want answers, and I suppose I do too, but I mostly want a story. I want *the* story. I want to be the audience and a character. I want to dive into the story and bathe in it. I want a story.